In this spellbinding, utterly unconventional fiction, an aging author identified only as "Reader" contemplates writing a novel about a writer, called simply "Protagonist, " who has left the city and taken a small house adjoining a cemetery. As Reader contemplates the writing of the novel, other matters insistently crowd his mind -- literary and cultural anecdotes, endless quotations attributed and not, scholarly curiosities -- the residue of a lifetime's reading, all he has to show for his decades on earth.